movie review: Waking Life

Yesterday my roommate and I were hanging out, listening to music, when I got the impulse to watch Waking Life, a movie I'd seen before but he hadn't. My old housemates from when I first moved to Ferndale let me borrow a burned DVD copy, and I keep forgetting to give it back to them.

The "plot" of the film is a central character's interactions with (or rather, observances of) entities expounding on various philosophical opinions and emotional extremes. After several watchings, I'm still not sure whether the context of the film is a lucid dream or postmortem self-realization. What I do believe is that the various "people" the main character interacts with are his thoughts in corporeal form, and "he" is revisiting the opinions that make him who he is. Towards the end, he is told by one character that he "hasn't met himself yet", implying that "he" is not really himself, but an observer of his own various trains of thought. Over the course of the movie, each philosophical extreme is influenced by the previously realized encounter, and his thoughts are built upon and coalesced to the final moment when he encounters the correct combination of feelings.